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Reading Slothfully
I was told in elementary school that I only could read at half the speed for success in college. Oh well, one benefit of slow reading is you get to live with the characters a longer period of time. I read in a vain attempt to better understand people. At my other homes, I'm known as a spouse, pop, guy in the choir, physical chemist, computer/web dilettante and child-care provider. In theory, I'm a published author, if you consider stuff like Quenching Cross Sections for Electronic Energy Transfer Reactions Between Metastable Argon Atoms and Noble Gases and Small Molecules to count as publications. I've strewn dozens of such fascinating things to the winds.
Currently reading
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
The Spirit of the Border
Ramona the Brave (Ramona, #3)
The Underground Man (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)
Delilah of the Snows
Mrs. Miniver
Betsy-Tacy Treasury (P.S.)
A Christmas Carol
The Way Some People Die
Envy of Angels
What Happened to the Corbetts
Another gem by Nevil Shute. The Corbetts are a normal English family—father, mother, two small children and a baby, living in a small house with a lovely garden—who find themselves scuttling to their garage for safety against a surprise bomb raid on their city. After the bomb raids continue, but only on cloudy nights, they decide to escape for safety to their small yacht, with hopes of eventually making it to safety in Canada. The suddenness of the bomb raids pretty much destroys normal modes of communication—newspapers and radios—so no one much knows what's going on. Essential goods, gasoline, milk, bread, become scarce. Some kind of medical epidemic appears, perhaps; no one knows how virulent or wide spread. Thus everyone is left to speculate as to how best to protect themselves and their loved ones. They don't really know who the "enemy" is (never called out in the book) or why he suddenly began a random bombing campaign. People are pretty much forced to live day by day, making out as best they can. This story tells how the Corbetts themselves did that. Quite a nice story.
It was written shortly before World War II broke out, so is a bit prophetic it would seem. Certainly terrorist bombing of civilians became common in WWII, both in the German's regular air raids over London, and in our own flying over Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, .... Now, we're more sophisticated, we have drones do our terrorism for us. No real people involved.
